


and amber is ageless

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [18]
Category: DCU, Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Chips - Freeform, Earth-3, Gen, Mirror Universe, Stray Cat, The Fortress of Solitude, Violent Thoughts, but story overall weirdly wholesome, cats available free, in which the pov character is evil but nothing horrible actually happens, lonely people, owning cats expensive, spree shopping, veterinarians do not give a crap who you are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 22:38:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16105256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Kal-El is not down on his luck, because he is a handsome supervillain with a crystal castle who can fly and punch out moons. He hates everything anyway.He meets a cat.





	and amber is ageless

**Author's Note:**

> Posting this idiocy in hopes of getting out of this rather bizarre form of writing slump where it's not that I can't write, I'm just deeply unsatisfied with the results.

It had been one of his occasional sojourns in human disguise; a supply run. Kal did not, strictly speaking, _need_ to eat as long as he had sunlight, but his stomach never seemed to believe that, and while the Fortress could manufacture acceptable rations they were simply not real food.

Real Kryptonian food being unavailable, real Earth food would have to do.

He could always take what he wanted, and not infrequently did, but while a man (especially a flying man with superspeed) could dine and dash with panache, there was simply no way to use cosmic power to rob a corner store of its Oreo supply without a loss of dignity.

Besides, exposing himself to being interrupted or accosted by law enforcement or Luthor every time he stepped out for a bite to eat had palled quickly.

He kept canned goods in stock, picked up a monthly grocery order in Anchorage, and otherwise simply changed into ordinary human clothes when he wished to make a purchase. So long as he kept his head down, people very rarely recognized him without his cape and family crest.

Blind fools.

The clerk at the convenience store had been in a voluble mood regarding the weather, his hairstyle, and her own upcoming wedding, and it had cost Kal some effort not to punch her lungs out. _She’s not worth it,_ he’d told himself. _Just get your damn chips and leave._

He kind of liked the leather jacket he was wearing, and didn’t feel like getting blood all over it just yet. And while his laser vision could have cut her in two and left the shop burning merrily, that would have lacked the visceral satisfaction of punching, and he was trying to keep a low profile. So he’d restricted himself to glaring until she went pale and shut up, then paid for his snacks and left.

His sense of grievance came with him. The clerk had been dumpy, with unattractively short hair and zits on her chin. And _she_ had somebody. Sure, it was some guy with low enough standards to marry that, and probably they’d be divorced again inside five years, but still. Why was someone like her happily gushing over her love life, while he, with objectively vastly more to bring to the table, couldn’t get a woman to look back at him? Not one he was actually _interested_ in, at least.

He kicked moodily at a discarded beer can in his path, but he had to restrain his strength so the can didn’t explode or go flying fifty miles or anything, so it wasn’t satisfying at all. He should go off into space again soon and beat up some asteroids. Maybe that bounty hunter with the space bike would take another shot at him and Kal could beat him up and take the bike. He didn’t _need_ a space bike, but it looked cool. Or would. If you got rid of the…skulls.

Girls liked motorcycles, although Kal was pretty sure most of them didn’t like ugly glam rockers. Not that he would start riding a motorcycle just because he thought girls would like it, he was a _grown adult who could fly._

And really, it was stupid to be pouting about not having a girlfriend. It wasn’t like no one wanted him. He was handsome and powerful, he had _groupies._ But not only did they tend to be kind of boring to talk to, as soon as he let his guard down with them, they _broke._

Owlman might get off on that kind of thing, if he had super strength; Kal _knew_ Superwoman did. He didn’t. It sucked. Sex was sex and murder was murder, and combining them was gross even when you did it on purpose.

Most of the women he knew who _could_ hold up to him were either sort of horrifying or treated him like a joke. (And then of course there was Diana, who was both those things, and he was _never going to be that desperate ever again he had learned his lesson nope._ ) Or they just hated him. Sometimes the reason he was most sorry he’d made such a crap first impression on the Brightseid was it had ruined his chances with Apokoliptan women.

But then again, there was Lois. Lois who was fragile and human and breakable and had from the very first looked at him without the slightest fear in her eyes.

He’d been throwing cars around to make a point, during the opening of his first bid for control of Metropolis. Lois had happened to be there, on the sidewalk, and she hadn’t run away. Kal had loomed over her, an SUV held up like Atlas, ready to squash her. He’d been thinking she didn’t get it, that this neatly-pressed lady with the professional pumps and the gleaming chestnut bob thought of his rampage as something happening in another world, that couldn’t possibly affect _her._

But no. Those huge dark eyes had looked up into his and he’d seen that she understood he could kill her. That he _might_ kill her. She _just wasn’t afraid._

Then she’d asked his name.

 _What?_ he asked dumbly. Lowering the SUV slightly in his confusion. _What? Why?_ Did she think she could catch him out like that somehow? Did she _recognize_ him somehow, from when he’d been Clark, had they gone to the same middle school or something? Was she _hitting on him?_

 _For the article,_ she explained, as if this was just a normal conversation. _About what you’re doing here. Lois Lane,_ she explained further. _Daily Planet. What should we call you in the piece?_

He’d been—sort of flattered, even though obviously a superhuman being smashing up a street couldn’t help but be news. The acknowledgment had still been nice. A taste of the recognition he’d gain, now that he knew his destiny and was ready to seize it with both hands.

 _Kal-el,_ he said, gazing into the warm interested brown of her eyes, and maybe he fell a little bit in love right then. He tossed the SUV aside. _Kal-el of the planet Krypton, last scion of the House of El. I am the ultimate being on this world, and I will rule over it._

She’d been fascinated, possibly impressed. But not, he’d realized too late, the way he wanted her to be.

Lois hadn’t been directly involved in his defeat that time, not as far as he knew. Luthor had gotten lucky, that was all. She contributed more and more, over the years, as she learned his patterns and his weaknesses, and it was inconvenient because he couldn’t bear to kill her, but even so he was perversely proud of her for it. He’d but rather lose to her than that pompous cueball, anyway.

Also, he liked making her pay such close attention to him, even if it was to take him down.

It _was_ possible to frighten her, he’d learned quickly enough: in a certain-death situation that gave her enough time to absorb her likely fate, but no way to take action, fear would cover her face and fill her eyes like dark honey. She could also become frightened _for_ others, if left helpless to save them, though it was harder to get her to accept the fact of her helplessness when she wasn’t the only one in danger.

It was _difficult_ to engineer situations where she was more afraid than angry, and the more times he set them up without allowing her to actually die, the more rare it became.

Kal kept doing it. He’d been at it for literal years before he admitted it was becoming an obsession.

She got twitchy and vicious, eventually, strung wire-tight to the point that if he hadn’t already been in love he might not have noticed she was beautiful, anymore. He would watch her from across the city through the walls of the Daily Planet, drinking cup after cup of coffee, her left hand full of a compulsive tremor every time she lifted it from the keyboard. She snapped at all her coworkers. Her boss was understanding, but kept calling her into his office to lecture her about creating a hostile work environment.

But still, when Kal appeared before her, the low dread might sharpen and her adrenaline spike, but her outrage always kept pace. And she got better and better at conspiring with Luthor to set traps.

After another few years, he mostly stopped trying; he’d realized if she ever _did_ start looking terrified every time she saw him, it wouldn’t make him feel any better. Sometimes he still got angry enough, though, or just decided that watching the fear drown out the loathing and disgust was worth it, and he went after her again.

Sometimes he just wanted to _see_ her, up close where she could see him, too, and not just far off through a wall.

Sometimes, she did something that _deeply pissed him off_.

A lot of the time, even when she hadn’t done anything particularly provocative to draw him out, he pretended she had. Enough people knew he was obsessed, without actually _admitting_ it.

Luthor’s smug face flashed across his mind’s eye, the look he’d had last time Kal had flown straight into one of his stupid traps, and his fists clenched. His foot landed on the sidewalk hard enough to leave a crack. He did his best to shake his mind back to Lois. Lois drove him crazy, but most of the time it was a soothing sort of crazy. Sometimes just thinking about her helped. Sometimes he could plan what he could do or say, next time, to get a good reaction, and that made things better.

Sometimes he could even daydream about a Lois who _understood_ , who looked at him after he finally took the world in hand and saw he deserved it, and how much she meant to him, and stepped close and said not _I’ll stop you_ but _I’ll help you_. Ruling the world wouldn’t be hard, with her beside him. 

Today, the concentration it took to get his mind on that track was the most effort he wanted to make. This was a _day off_. This was a day to eat chips and watch TV. He had four bags of chips. He had some of the Kryptonian cultural recordings his father had sent in the databanks, and if those turned out to be too stressful he’d had his Fortress hack into human cable, so he could watch that, too. He was not going to ruin his day off by thinking about Luthor, or anyone else who pissed him off.

It would probably help him feel less like crap if he went somewhere that wasn’t gray and drizzling. But he didn’t feel like heading home yet, and it would feel stupid carrying four bags of chips halfway around the planet to find a nice sunny beach to stroll down. Besides, there was something to be said for weather that matched your mood.

Something skittered onto the sidewalk from the left.

His honest first thought was that it was a rat. A weirdly tall, dripping rat, with huge pointy ears.

Kal knew rats, though—his second-worst foster home had been plagued with them, and he’d been invulnerable enough by then they couldn’t actually _hurt_ him but he’d hated waking up to them in his bed, or trying to fall asleep to the sound of their feet. He’d gotten a lot of early practice with his powers in catching up to rats and crushing their little skulls, until he could do it in one precise finger-tap.

That was actually what had gotten him out of that place, the foster lady coming home to find him in a room full of headless rat corpses.

(Rats weren’t actually stupid enough to keep coming into a room where a lot of rats had just died; he’d had to hunt them all over the house. She’d come in just as he’d gotten all the dead rats together in the living room to see how many he’d gotten, which had probably looked pretty gross but honestly, he’d been doing her a _favor._ )

No, _this_ was pretty clearly on second glance a bony, undersized, filthy, sopping-wet _cat._ It scamper-stalked out of the alleyway he’d been about to pass like the alley had personally offended it, probably by containing whatever water it had just plunged into, and didn’t even notice him until it was right in his path. Then it froze, like it was hoping he somehow hadn’t noticed it.

“You look like I feel,” Kal told it. Except dirtier.

The draggled creature tipped up its pointed face at him at this, and _glared_.

Kal glared back. Not as hard as he could. If he really felt like it, looks _could_ kill, but he didn’t really _want_ to incinerate a stray cat right now. “Move,” he said.

He could just step over it, of course. Or kick it out of his way.

Or _fly away,_ there was nothing he actually needed to walk in this direction for _._ But fuck that. This thing ought to know who was boss. Even with only the powers of the human he looked like, he could kill it almost without effort, there was so much difference between them in _size alone_.

It raised its chin even higher, opened its mouth wide, and let out a long, imperious meow. It might as well have said in plain English, _no, you move._

He wasn’t even _in its way_. There was an absolute, unshaken absence of fear in huge dark amber eyes, and suddenly this was the funniest thing that had happened to him in weeks. If not years.

“Damn,” Kal told the scraggly little creature. “You _really_ remind me of someone.”

It yelled at him again, and with a snort he bent down and scooped it up in with his free hand under its belly. He could barely fit his whole hand between its front and back legs. It promptly did its best to sink its little fangs into his wrist and recoiled, shrieking in outrage about the sensation of biting down on impervious skin.

“Yeah, that’s what you get,” Kal told it. After a second’s thought he tucked it into the crook of his arm, where it sank all its claws and teeth into the leather of his jacket. Kal frowned. He _liked_ this jacket. “Hey.”

It took a little more care and effort than he usually bothered with to juggle his shopping bag of junk food so it hung from his wrist, without crushing the chips, and unhook the little monster without really messing up his sleeve or breaking any tiny bones. If it had actually been able to hurt him he probably would have thrown it into a wall at this point and moved on.

But it couldn’t, and after holding it at arm’s length for a second he shrugged and stuck it inside his coat, where dirty water promptly started to soak into his shirt and coat lining. It would cut the wind a little, and the Fortress’ automatic dry-clean would handle the water stain and any fleas that tried to set up shop. Not that _they’d_ have any better luck biting him than the damp, squirmy thing currently trying to rip out his lungs, but like the rats it was a matter of principle. And also hygiene.

Kal took the cat home. He gave it a bath in one of the self-sterilizing lab sinks—it threw an absolute screeching clawing fit about that, the yowls swallowed up by the vastness of the lab and echoing faintly from the crystal facets of its vaulted ceiling, but only managed to deliver another slight rip to his T-shirt in revenge. The Fortress AI approved of none of this, but Kal muted it with the ease of habit. He'd never been able to keep the interface modeled on his father deactivated for long, but he'd stopped treating it like it really _was_ his father years ago.

Besides, he was an adult, even if it _had_ been his father he didn't have to listen to it.

The cat dried startlingly fluffy—a long-haired breed, he guessed, and maybe still kitten-fuzzy. With the grime gone, it was patched white and gold, a marmalade-orange triangle sprawled sloppily over its left eye.

Once it was dry and Kal had let it maul his hand in a glove (so it had something it could actually rip into) for about ten minutes and fed it a can of tuna one morsel at a time, all seemed to be forgiven. It butted demandingly against his wrist when he ran out of tuna, and he snorted at it and pushed over the tuna water. Its butt waggled in excitement as it lapped at the salty fishy goodness in the bottom of the can. It didn’t even turn to glare again as he ran one finger down its spine.

He guessed he had a cat now.

* * *

 

Kal took his new pet to a veterinarian—not anonymously, exactly; they asked for his name when he came in and he told them he was Calvin L. Kant. He could have kicked himself for the _Kant._ They didn’t really care anyway, as it turned out, didn’t ask for any form of ID; they were much more interested in the name of the cat.

“Matchbox,” he said.

Apparently he now owned a cat named Matchbox.

Kal wasn’t used to waiting, these days, and by the time a veterinary assistant actually turned up in the exam room he’d been assigned he had seriously considered leaving twice, throwing Matchbox into a wall once, and knocking over a few walls and demanding they see to _his_ pet _right now_ at least four times.

Only the fact that then all his asshole acquaintances would find out he’d adopted a cat kept him from going through with the last one.

Eventually some sort of assistant turned up and asked a bunch of questions he couldn't answer, like how long his cat that was indeed apparently kind of still a kitten had been weaned, and when he finally growled out that he found the thing in an alley she smiled a game sort of smile that looked like it came from being trained to wrangle huge angry dogs that wanted to bite her, and said, "Oh, so _he_ found _you!_ "

Kal still didn't kill her. "...sure."

Without subjecting Kal-el to any more attempts at conversation, Matchbox was treated for worms, fleas, and ticks, and given what was apparently just the first round of vaccinations. Matchbox weighed two pounds and was about two and a half months old. Apparently Matchbox was a male. Oh well. Good thing he hadn’t named it after Lois.

Why _Matchbox,_ anyway?

A flash of Kansas, thirty years ago. The faux-wood-paneled sides of a matchbox car that weighed in his palm _just so_ —

Kal cut the recollection off before it could extend to who had been with him in it, or anything they might have said, because thirty years hadn’t made him less likely to want to vomit at the memories but it had made him very good at derailing them.

Okay, so it was about as big as a matchbox car had seemed when he was seven. Fine.

(He wondered how hard you had to throw a cat, to kill someone with it?)

“Okay,” said the girl at the check-out desk, “and the feline leukemia shot. You’ll want to get him back here in about two weeks to get him fixed.”

“What if I _don’t_ want to.”

“Then he’ll yell a lot and pee on all your stuff.” She shrugged and hit a final button. “That’ll be one ninety-three, with the treats.”

Kal paid cash.

Matchbox wasn’t a fan of being flown around at superspeed, and even less so if Kal tried to carry him anywhere but tucked inside his coat, so Kal left him behind when he went cat-supply shopping.

He could probably get the Fortress to give him most of the things he needed, but money wasn’t an issue—he had a couple small fortunes at this point and could always get more—and he’d rather just tell the pet store clerk to get him everything he needed for a ten-week-old cat than do his own research and then try to puzzle through how to get the Fortress to fabricate all of it.

He bought a four-month supply of kitten food, mostly in cans, along with a comfortable-looking cat bed and about a dozen different toys, including two with bells and one with a squeaker.

He got a bag of kitty litter, but only for reference. He was absolutely sure the Fortress automation could with a little coaxing come up with an alternative he would be free to totally ignore, or he’d have dropped the idea of owning a cat as soon as he remembered litter boxes existed. (Matchbox could hardly be allowed out into the polar weather even if he’d been willing to brave it, which Kal doubted he was stupid enough to do.)

He picked up food and water bowls because why not. He picked up a patented enzymatic cat-odor-remover formula in a squirt bottle for the Fortress to analyze. He picked up a pre-made cat tree, also for reference—adding small architectural flourishes was one of the easiest things to do in the Fortress, but it wasn’t like he knew how far cats could jump, and there might be a texture issue. And on his way out a display of collars caught his eye, and he carefully selected one in red and blue leather.

“Okay, sir,” said the clerk, once he’d been rung up and everything but the cat tree was in bags. “You want a hand getting all this out to your car?”

Kal raised one eyebrow, and started picking up bags. The light, bulky one with the cat bed. Ten pounds of cat litter. Two hundred pounds of canned food, split up into lots of twenty, and another fifteen pounds of kibble. Toys, jingling. He looped the plastic bags in his right hand over his wrist, picked up the cat tree and propped it over his left shoulder, like it weighed nothing, which it did.

“I don’t have a car,” he said. And strolled out through the automatic doors pretending not to notice the employee’s dumbfounded expression.

It was so much fun being him sometimes.

It would _also_ have been fun bursting out through the roof, but that would blow his cover, and it would be less hassle to come back here if he wanted to replenish any of the things he’d bought, than go find another pet store which might not stock the same products.

Matchbox was hiding again when Kal got home. It didn’t do him any good—Kal could track him by heartbeat alone, and when he stuck his hand behind the console to reach him and Matchbox dashed the other way, Kal was in front of him in the new direction before he could even finish bolting. “Come here, you idiot,” he grumbled, as the stupid animal unsuccessfully gnawed on one of his knuckles. “I brought food.”

He'd decided to set up a small side chamber between the main console room and his bedroom as the Cat Room, because it was easily accessible from the parts of the Fortress where he spent most of his time but could be shut up and ignored at need. He didn’t have visitors here often, but he didn’t need them cracking jokes about the cat bed under his workstation if he did.

He was pretty sure Owlman didn't keep pets in his Roost, unless you counted Talon, though he'd secured it against X-ray vision a long time ago so Kal would have to dodge a lot of booby traps to break through a wall and be sure.

Kal could always shoot off something about the Cat if Owlman gave him a hard time, but he basically never came out ahead when he tried to argue with Owlman, so he was better off just avoiding the whole issue.

Matchbox was happy enough to eat, and afterwards much friendlier toward Kal again. Hopefully he wouldn’t suffer amnesia and bite the hand that fed him every time Kal turned up. He’d break his teeth sooner or later, for one thing.

Kal decided to wait until the idiot had settled in and was at least using the stupid bed, before trying the collar.

He wished he could show Matchbox to Lois, but of course she'd tell the whole world because that was what she _did._ Besides, she'd probably just say something cutting. He didn't think Lois was the kind of woman who melted over baskets of kittens.

 _He reminded me of you,_ he told the Lois in his head, the one who understood, and moved his hand very carefully over white and orange pointed ears.

Matchbox sneezed.

* * *

 

By his next vet appointment Matchbox was half again as big, continued to scorn his cat bed whenever possible in favor of the pool of cape that formed when Kal sat down, and had developed a particular demanding meow that instructed the Fortress to give him a platform to leap onto in whatever direction he was facing. Kal wasn’t sure whether he was more proud of his cat’s intelligence or his AI’s adaptability.

He was working on setting up an exclusion for ‘if that platform would give Matchbox a good angle from which to leap onto Kal-El’s head,’ though. He had his limits.

It was a _miracle_ he hadn’t killed the stupid furball the first time it jumped him in his sleep. A responsible pet owner would probably bar the cat from his room at night, but fortunately Kal was a supervillain.

“Mrow,” said Matchbox, sliding claws carefully into the weave of Ultraman’s indestructible cape and scaling his back like Mount Everest. It was slower climbing than the easy scamper up his leg and side in human clothes, which were made of fabric that was all weak points and could be successfully stabbed without finesse, but the cat was getting better at it all the time.

“Moron,” Kal told the cat sprawled over the swell of his shoulder, chewing ineffectually on the tip of his collar, without bothering to take his attention off the Fortress’ latest projection of a new design for radiation shielding that would keep Luthor’s ace in the hole well and truly neutralized. “That’s not any more edible than me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Kal has issues. And a stupid flared collar because all the Silver Age comics agreed they were fashionable on Krypton. But he also has a cat! As mentioned in Science Fiction Double Feature.
> 
> Lois’ eyes are listed on the official wiki as blue, and most often drawn that way, but I mostly picture her as looking more or less like Teri Hatcher although a bit darker and pointier, and there are _way_ too frickin' many blue-eyed raven-brunettes in the DCU. It’s not actually a very common phenotype anywhere but Ireland. So, brown.
> 
> Oh also that enzymatic cat-odor-remover stuff is real and works really well, including on organic smells not made by cats. (Like the garbage can liner or rotten melon guts allllll over.) It's totally anachronistic in 1998 but I left it in anyway, nyah.


End file.
